Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, University of the Arts
333 S Broad St.
Philadelphia, PA

Screening:

Lightbox Film Center at International House Philadelphia
September 28th, October 5th, and October 12th at 7pm
3701 Chestnut St.
Philadelphia, PA

Making/Breaking the Binary: Women, Art, & Technology 1968-1985, is a multi-venue survey focusing on a generation of pioneering female new media artists, reconsidering their role as technology innovators.

Curated by Kelsey Halliday Johnson and initially supported by a $60,000 grant from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, the exhibition engages with early computer art, painting, video art, experimental photography, copy machine art, electronic music, and publication projects, among other disciplines.

The exhibition will include visual artists such as Jennifer Bartlett and Lynda Benglis, and video and media art pioneers Sonia Landy Sheridan, Joan Jonas, Lynda Benglis, Shigeko Kubota, and Dara Birnbaum. To accompany the exhibition, Johnson will create a reading library that will place these artists into direct dialogue with a broader history of women in technology, with the aim to “further the scholarship of technology and art surveys in which women are under-represented or not contextualized in the field of their peers,” Johnson says. Featured technologists include Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer; Katherine Johnson, NASA’s “human computer;” Mary Allen Wilkes, inventor of the operating system; and Rebecca Allen, the first Emmy Award-winning computer animation artist; among others.

The core of the exhibition will be held at the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, with auxiliary screenings at Lightbox Film Center and Vox Populi. The opening reception is October 8, 2017, from 4–7pm at Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery.

In Passion Over Reason, curator Sarah Stanners brings together work by Tom Thomson and Joyce Weiland and takes a critical approach to Canada’s fascination with Thomson, his status as a cult figure of masculine mystique, and the mystery and mythology of his life story that has cast a virile, woodsy painter as the embodiment of quiet, Canadian resilience.

Interwoven with the work by Thomson, Wieland, whose playful use of sex and humour addresses issues of ecology, patriotism and the pitfalls of nationalism, celebrates a feminist perspective on Canada through her films, collage, and embroidery.

“Wieland’s deep fascination and love for Thomson and for Canada is revealed through the bookwork published alongside her 1971 True Patriot Love exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada (its first solo exhibition for a living Canadian woman artist). In it, Wieland effectively subsumed a government-issued compendium of arctic flora by infiltrating it with needlework, annotations, and photos taken by Tom Thomson.”

With a focus on a play with nationality, gender and sexuality, Passion Over Reason will present a new perspective on two iconic, trailblazing Canadian artists.

Lisa and Janelle Iglesias, known as Las Hermanas Iglesias, present the fruits of their artist residency at the ASU Art Museum through a new collaborative body of work, Re:Sisters.

Using sculpture, prints and site-specific interventions the sisters focus on both collaboration and resistance and “create artworks that disrupt borders, engage absurdity and promote the benefits of working together. As the title suggests, the works in the exhibition engage the artists’ own familial relationship, resist categorization and speak to processes and gestures of disobedience.

The ASU Art Museum Artist Residency, established in 2011, encourages emerging and established artists to develop and experiment with new bodies of work. Artists selected for the residency have a multi-disciplinary practice with a strong record of process-based, community and collaborative projects in order to explore forms of engagement and to develop socially-based, laboratory-type art projects.

Boasting a roster of over one hundred artists from fourteen Latin American countries (including the United States), Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985 demonstrates the rich artistic practices located in, and in dialogue, with Latin America. Radical Women’s co-curators, Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Andrea Giunta, have put together a path-breaking exhibition, one which promiscuously pursues . Of course, well-known figures are represented here (Marisol, Marta Minujín, Ana Mendieta, etc.), but many artists will be new to a U.S. viewing public. Importantly, the curators decided to include Chicana and Latina artists in their roster, making an important argument regarding the (in)visibility of these artists within U.S.-based art histories as well.

In the catalog, which is an indispensible volume for both scholars of Latin America and neophytes, the co-curators list hundreds of interlocutors and collaborators—each entrenched in the visual and political histories of their respective regions. The exhibition’s strength is predicated on this highly inclusive, collaborative ethos, and will also be a model in terms of how it troubles curatorial authorship and expertise.

Throughout the three-month run of the exhibition local artists, art historians, and curators will be giving walk-through tours of the show, illuminating threads and lines of thought that might otherwise go unnoticed. October 7th brings a concert of contemporary musicians reimagining the music of Peruvian American singer Yma Sumac (née Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chávarri del Castillo). The exhibition travels to the Brooklyn Museum of Art after it closes in Los Angeles.

The centerpiece of this exhibition is likely to become the focal point of a flurry of think-pieces come mid-September. That’s because Cassils, who is well-known for their work highlighting and extending the themes of bodily endurance in performance, has been collecting nearly 200 gallons of their own urine since Donald Trump rescinded an Obama-era executive order allowing transgender students to use whichever restroom matches their chosen gender identity. Part protest, part quantifying gesture, Cassil’s pee will be gathered in a new cubic sculpture entitled PISSED—think Hans Haacke’s Condensation Cube (1963-65) but filled with slowly circulating urine. Accompanying this sculpture will be other works that focus on embodied breath, the trans body, and the conditions of duress and memory. Together, these works have much to say to the current administration whose callous disregard of the poor, of people of color, and of queer people (LGBTQIA). If we are living through another culture war—and indeed it seems we are—Cassils has drawn sharp and useful battle lines.

Cassils will present a live performance, Fountain, at the opening reception on September 16, 6-8pm, wherein they will be cathetered to PISSED, evincing the ways in which the trans body is almost always a medicalized body—ammended and abutted by systems of care, treatment, and pathology.

Melike Kara’s paintings represent the latest permutation of the figural group painting genre. Her cast of characters, rendered abstractly and with ambiguous gender and racial characteristics, play, eat, sleep, and have sex. Oftentimes large tongues loll out of their mask-like faces, looking more like diminutive speech balloons than anything else. Throughout these works you can see that Kara is attempting a re-visioning of Modernist painting, a bastardization of Matisse’s arabesque line and color with the more contemporary figural groupings by painters such as Sue Williams, Leon Golub, and Chris Ofili. Recently Kara has begun to play with spatializing her paintings, putting them on glass and using them as room dividers. What this show will bring is a mystery, but given Kara’s bombastic, if short, track record, it will no doubt provide grist for the art historical mill.